Due to the episode's uniqueness and originality, plot and production details were kept very secret. Despite releasing paragraph length plot summaries for each episode in advance of its airing, all the BBC released for this episode was: "This is footage collected from a space rescue mission. If you value your life, your sanity, and the future of your species, DO NOT WATCH IT".
In order to get the character point of view, the camera operator dressed up as character, held props, and would recite lines of the character he was portraying.
The Doctor states he sleeps "when you aren't looking." At the time, he was looking at Clara, whose point of view was being shown to the audience, cleverly getting around the normal fourth wall break.
Mark Gatiss has spoken about the episode saying "Well, I've had this story in my mind for a long time. It's set in the future. It's all from different points of view, which has not been done before on Doctor Who (2005). It's been quite a challenge to make because you have to break a lot of the usual rules in terms of what you can actually show. Anything you can do to shake the format up is very exciting and that's what we've done."
The space station is named after Urbain Le Verrier, the French mathematician who predicted the presence of Neptune (the planet the space station orbits) from oddities in the orbit of Uranus.